Engineers develop the first floating solar hydrogen-generating device

Becoming more common, solar energy is being used in many unique ways such as roof tops, windows, car roofs etc. Researchers have now created a floating, solar hydrogen-generating device to perform electrolysis.

In just a single hour, the energy from the sun to Earth is equal to all the energy used by the world in a year. Thus, in order to use it for a greater good, Daniel Esposito from Columbia Engineering studied the procedure of water electrolysis (splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen) to transform electricity from solar photovoltaics (PVs) into storable hydrogen fuel.

Hydrogen is thought to play a vital role in future sustainable energy. The process used to produce hydrogen currently releases a lot of carbon dioxide. However, this newly developed device is a photovoltaic-powered electrolysis device that can function as a stand-alone platform and floats on open water, without any carbon dioxide emissions. The floating PV electrolyzer is a ‘solar fuels rig’ that will generate hydrogen fuel from sunlight and water.

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Where the usual electrolyzers use expensive items such as membranes or dividers to separate hydrogen and oxygen, the novel device depends on an electrode configuration that lets the gases to separate and collect through buoyancy of water bubbles, which is comparatively low-cost. The result is product purity as high as 99%, reported Science Alert.

“The simplicity of our PV-electrolyzer architecture, without a membrane or pumps, makes our design particularly attractive for its application to seawater electrolysis, thanks to its potential for low cost and higher durability compared to current devices that contain membranes,” expressed Esposito

For future, the team is refining the device for more efficient functioning in real seawater that is an additional challenge. Also, the teams aims to develop modular designs that they can use in order to build larger and scaled-up systems, wrote Phys.

“Being able to safely demonstrate a device that can perform electrolysis without a membrane brings us another step closer to making seawater electrolysis possible. These solar fuels generators are essentially artificial photosynthesis systems, doing the same thing that plants do with photosynthesis, so our device may open up all kinds of opportunities to generate clean, renewable energy,” said Jack Davis, the paper's first author.